The piano is gutted. A plush dog sleeps on the keyboard. Next to the instrument is a chair. It is the ready place for the listener. But no one plays the piano anymore in this room, in this bombed and destroyed house in Chernihiv. The mayor said it was easier to count the houses standing than those that came down. Photographs like this allow us to take a look at what remains, a longer, more careful look than is allowed to those who have left. It is a second vision, even a bit shameless, offered to us – distant spectators – and denied to those who will not return to that address in Chernihiv soon, perhaps will never return. Only earthquakes and wars – catastrophes that manifest themselves from the depths of the earth, or from the sky – cut houses in half, tear them apart, almost always leaving something intact, an object rendered useless and in any case full of memory, a washing machine, a piano , a painting, which speak of life as it was and will no longer be.
Everywhere silence and emptiness, as if everyone had boarded a night train and left
Serhij Zadan, a writer born in Starobil’sk, eastern Ukraine, wrote. Telling another stage of a war experienced by his country and already forgotten.